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George DemmyGeorge Demmy is Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and one of the founding members of TerraGo Technologies. In the role of CTO, he has responsibilities for oversight of various product and technical initiatives at TerraGo. During his tenure at TerraGo, Demmy has held roles in product development, architecture, marketing and management, and continues to participate in these and other aspects of company business. « Less

George DemmyGeorge Demmy is Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and one of the founding members of TerraGo Technologies. In the role of CTO, he has responsibilities for oversight of various product and technical initiatives at TerraGo. During his tenure at TerraGo, Demmy has held roles in product development, … More »

Deploying the Eyes of the Enterprise

If TerraGo’s tag line is “Share Anywhere”, then I would have to say that “do more with what you already have” is its mantra, though that is certainly implicit. I talk a bunch about doing more with your investments in ArcGIS, but should focus on exploring doing more with your people and yourself. An employee’s value to a company is measured by more than just performance against a job description. They can provide feedback and observations that have no places on forms or tables in the company’s database which can be extremely valuable. An aspect of a workforce to consider is its potential for distributed intelligence collection. By “intelligence”, I don’t necessarily imply anything covert or clandestine, but rather collecting information that is relevant to the efficient operation of the company. TerraGo provides tools and capabilities that facilitate the collection, recording, and sharing of observations and information, both ad hoc and structured. There are, of course, many systems for collecting data, but they tend to be closed loop, working within certain systems and paradigms for bespoke purposes. TerraGo, historically, extended systems already in place to meet wider audiences and provision those audience with powerful location-enabled tools to let them do more with what they got from those systems. Use Publisher in ArcMap to make a GeoPDF map that can be shared , interacted with, and marked up in Toolbar in Reader, transforming what would be an otherwise static document into a data collection tool.

For mobile devices, we have TerraGo Edge, an enterprise groupsourcing application. I use the term groupsource as opposed to crowdsource to distinguish between Edge’s focus on a trusted circle of users (the numbers of which might be very large indeed) from crowsourcing’s faceless masses. Edge makes it easy to share what you see, make observations, photos, fill out forms and jot down notes, and share them back with the enterprise using smartphones and tablets. The combination of Edge on mobile devices and GeoPDF documents enables anyone to contribute quantitative, location-enabled information to the company whether-or-not it’s strictly germane to a rigid interpretation of their job description, and transforms the mobile workforce into the eyes of the enterprise, a distributed intelligence collection capability built on existing infrastructure. That sounds like something every company needs!